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Europe's Vaccine Disaster

spiegel.de

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Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#191

Post by [deleted] »

neximo64 wrote: post #121
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #13

> The EU negotiating team, according to people familiar with the talks, was intent on pushing down the price. In the middle of a pandemic that is literally costing trillions, this seems like the EU negotiators lost sight of the big picture.

The teams in the UK and EU were led by two seasoned professionals, an EU trade negotiator, & in the UK a VC (as controversial as that is). The outcomes summarise the personalities of the two involved. Success for a negotiator is the cheapest cost. Success for a VC is return on investment. Both won spectacularly on their own fronts.

[deleted]

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#192

Post by framecowbird »

qwantim1 wrote: post #186
jackTheMan wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the Chinese vaccine with 50% efficiency could be used for herd immunity at all. Im not a virologyst, but the false safety of most people vaccinated with it in a country might could trigger even more death? The Chinese vaccine is not even tested above 59 years old. If the young is vaccinated and start to party etc the new more infectious variants could still spread and can reach even more elderly.

> virologyst Is this an actual spelling in some dialect of English? It looks interesting. In medicine, when I see “gy” I’m thinking gynolocologist.

Google Search Trends reports only tiny quantities of “virologyst” compared to “virologist”, and all from countries which are not English-native, so I’d classify it as a spelling mistake.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#193

Post by TheMechanist »

mrtksn wrote: post #52
Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #50

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this…

Chinese and the Russian vaccines were not even considered. Now those are used in mass vaccinations, soon EU would be behind all countries but those who barely have any government at all. People don't even want to talk about that, as if those alternatives don't exists. Non-EU countries in Europe are getting them. Serbia(6.1) and Turkey(2.3) are already close to EU average(2.6) or better on the vaccination process.

The Russian scientists have first discussed Sputnik V with EMA (EU's medicine agency) 5 days ago: https://www.msn.com/en-xl/europe/top-stories/russia-files-sp... ; Hungary, which is part of the EU, has already given the vaccine emergency authorization. However, vaccination in Hungary is lagging behind its neighbors Austria and Romania due low levels of trust (in the Russian vaccine) and general antivaxx sentiment. The Chinese have not discussed their vaccines or filed for marketing authorisation in the EU.

The development, evaluation, approval and monitoring process is described in detail here: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...

And on to of that Russia and China are much further behind in the rollout to their own population than the EU itself - see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-vaccination-doses-p...

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#194

Post by TheMechanist »

ahartmetz wrote: post #190
TheMechanist wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-sequitur, but true: this is a political hatchet job from delivered by a center-left newspaper to a center-right politician. The key to this crisis and article can be found in the middle of the article: "...von der Leyen's press department has been energetic in its defense of the Commissions actions. After all, the EU has secured rights to 2.3 billion doses of vaccine, they have pointed out, with 760 million of th…

Von der Leyen deserves all the hatchet jobs she can get... She is the child of a political dynasty and hasn't done anything well for citizens in her life.

Besides her parentage, you forgot to mention that she's a German woman and mother in a position of power, to fully "justify" your ad hominem attack.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#195

Post by [deleted] »

foepys wrote: post #183
jostmey wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hundreds of millions of dollars? Not even a billion dollars was set aside for vaccines as trillions of dollars are being lost?

That's what many people are getting mad about. Germany wanted to order from Biontech in July 2020 but the EU convinced them to let the EU order for a better "collective bargaining position". But this isn't the time to bargain. Just pay them a few billion Euros. Germany alone is estimated to be currently subsidizing its shut-down economy with around 4 billion Euros a week. Each week is more expensive than what the EU…

[deleted]

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#196

Post by throwaway4good »

We need to approve (or start trail programs of) vaccines from Russia, China, India.

And we need to put export controls on EU-produced vaccines just as the US has.

But we Europeans are too politically disorganised to do this and thus we loose out in particular to the US.

The EU at a political level has been an absolute disaster through the Corona crises, from the lack of support of Italy when the virus initially hit, to uncoordinated petty tit-for-tat border closures, to now this failure of vaccine purchases.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#197

Post by paganel »

vixen99 wrote: post #182
MrRiddle wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, I’m not convinced it’s such a disaster it’s being portayed. Serbia is/was heavily hit by Covid, yet only 12% more people died in 2020 than 5 year average before that. Again, meh.

Romanian death rate per 1000 (8th highest in the world) has increased monotonically from 12.7 in 2015 by 0.1/1000 each year to 13.2 in 2020. In other words Covid has had zero effect (to one significant place) on the increase in rate of death per 1000. However to claim Covid has not been a disaster is disingenuous. On many fronts it's been a calamity though much of this has been self-inflicted.

Any source for those 2020 numbers? Afaik the Romanian Statistics Institute only published mortality figures up to (and including) November 2020, and the nominal numbers were indeed similar to Serbia’s, i.e. up until then we had had about 10% more deaths in the first 11 months of the year compared to the first 11 months of 2019 (with November 2020 a particular dire month).

It’s also true that I couldn’t find an easy comparison with the previous 5 years average.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#198

Post by matzab »

flembat wrote: post #187
robotmay wrote: post #10

From what I've gathered (unfortunately mostly on Reddit, before this article), Ursula von der Leyen wasn't exactly fondly thought of in Germany before this and somehow keeps managing to fail upwards. Is that accurate? The utterly bonkers u-turn today was a bit of a shocker. For those that haven't seen the news, the European Commission managed to say they were effectively going to establish border controls between the…

I am in the UK and while in the EU I thought we were part of the world's reasonable ethical block, but now from outside it is apparent how badly the EU bullies and intimidates other countries.

A significant part of the vaccines the UK has administered were produced in EU factories. Now that the EU tries to do the same as countries like the UK and the US do - not exporting - they are bullies? Right.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#199

Post by TheMechanist »

Throwawayaerlei wrote: post #50

Some had faith in the new mRNA technology, while others preferred to rely on more time-tested methods. Sometimes articles hide a great deal in one seemingly innocuous sentence. From what I've learned from Europeans, there's only one vaccine candidate of that nature the EU considered, a Sanofi Pasteur/GlaxoSmithKline combo, the former providing the infamous spike protein, the latter an adjuvant. Everyone expected this…

Gentlemen, the hole is due to the fact that no company has the large scale productive capacity for the newly discovered COVID-19 vaccine.

Ordering earlier and paying more would just have shifted distribution around, and would not have made more doses available. Every vaccination done in the US or the UK means one less vaccine dose for Europe.

And that is not "ducking responsibility", it is basic logic - as one cannot fit 10 pegs in 9 holes, one cannot vaccinate 10 people with 9 doses.

Re: Europe's Vaccine Disaster

#200

Post by tiku »

On top of that the Dutch government had a leak in their testing and vaccination database, leaking all the social security numbers, address data etc. Total clusterfuck.
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